SINCE HENRY FORD APOLOGIZED...

"I was sad and I was blue  

But now I'm just as good as you

Since Henry Ford apologized to me.

I've thrown away my little Chevrolet

And bought myself a Ford Coupe."

                                                                             

Recalling Henry Ford, the Not-So-Good Capitalist

Published: September 9, 2012 

To the Editor:

“When Capitalists Cared” (Op-Ed, Sept. 3):

Hedrick Smith reminds us that Henry Ford had the reputation of a caring capitalist after bestowing on his workers the “unheard-of wage of $5 a day” in 1914. But for years Ford also resorted to legal as well as thug tactics to prevent workers in Ford plants from unionizing.

In December 1937, the company was found in violation of the Wagner Act and was ordered to cease interfering with workers’ efforts to unionize. In 1941, when wages at Ford were in fact lower than the average wage for the industry, Henry Ford continued to insist that “we do not intend to submit to any union.”

Finally, in the spring of 1941 — after violent strikes, brutal assaults by Ford agents and government pressure — Ford and his company capitulated and agreed to a union shop. Ford workers were finally able to negotiate a contract.

A vital, productive economy depends on strong unions as well as on enlightened employers.

SUSAN DUNN
Williamstown, Mass., Sept. 3, 2012

I'm glad he changed his point of view

And I even like Edsel too

Since Henry Ford apologized to me"

To the Editor:

I can understand holding up Henry Ford as an example of an industrialist who paid fair wages. I cannot, however, accept Ford’s self-assessment of his concern for social justice.

Ford’s anti-Semitism has been well documented. That it should not be mentioned in Hedrick Smith’s article is baffling. 

JACK HELLER

Huntington, Ind., Sept. 4, 2012

"My mother says she'll feed him if he calls

Gefilte fish and Matzah balls"

To the Editor:

Hedrick Smith is correct that America’s corporate leaders care less about middle-class wages than previously. But to make Henry Ford the symbol of a lost golden age is perverse.

Ford created the $5-a-day wage because he needed to reduce a yearly staff turnover of more than 200 percent (Foxconn has increased its wages in China fivefold since 2010 for similar reasons).

Mr. Smith also commends “other executives [who] bought his logic” for cooperating with unions. Ford employed a brutal union-busting operation and was the last big automaker to recognize a union.

Unlike German leaders who have endeavored to preserve jobs in today’s bad economy, in 1931 Ford laid off 75,000 people, leading to the Ford Hunger March in 1932. Dearborn, Mich., police and Ford security opened fire on unarmed marchers, shooting dozens and killing five.

Labor terms may be bad today, but I am glad Henry Ford is not around to improve them.

NOAH McCORMACK
Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 3, 2012

Of course Henry Ford had a lot of 'splainin' to do over a long and busy lifetime. I believe he would have a honored place in MITT & PAUL'S JOB CREATOR HALL-OF-FAME,  if they had one, although back in 1906 Woodrow Wilson- then Governor of NJ- was afraid that Henry's horseless carriage might very well bring socialism to Amercia by "inciting the poor to envy the rich!"  He did alright for himself financially and makes all of us school drop-outs mighty proud. He didn't know or care too much about history and that showed over the course of his career - I believe his friend Thomas Alva was another school drop-out - they were both young boys in Michigan playing hooky and tinkering with stuff. Imagine.

Ford, as a teacher of the History of Education once wrote, " by ignoring history, unleashed a technological revolution whose consequences he immediately ignored because he couldn't deal with such even though he could have known them. Would progress have stopped or would we have had a different form of automobile and highways without pollution and death from accidents? By denying history he chose only one course to progress and thereby limited us to one alternative."  Like only being capable of holding one idea at a time because your little brain doesn't have more room for anything else. Warren Susman, one-time Professor at Columbia wrote in his Culture and History,"Evidence indicates not only little formal education in Henry Ford's life, but also almost no use at all for books-also there seems to be no sense of any religious training or commitment." 

  For 7 years beginning in the spring of 1920 Henry Ford published through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, the most damaging and scurrilous propaganda of hatred directed at the Jewish People. I mean this was some ugly stuff - and it pre-dated many if not most of the Nazi papers to come. From the time it started to appear Louis Marshall was in the forefront of the fight to stop the slanderous assault. Marshall was a leader of American Jewry, a founder of the Amercian Jewish Committee; an advocate for civil rights, a well-respected lawyer, a contemporary of Louis Brandeis - they were born the same year. Of the Ford papers Marshall said, " They constitute a libel upon an entire people who had hoped that at least in Amercia they might be spared the insult, the humiliation and the obloquy which these articles are scattering throughout the land and which are echoes from the dark middle ages."  It took some time before any accommodation - such as it was to be- was agreed to; initially Marshall's efforts were met by Ford and his "people" with antagonistic overtones, even calling him a Bolshevik. "These articles," Ford answered at the time, "shall continue and we hope you will continue to read them and when you have attained a more tolerable state of mind we shall be glad to discuss them with you." It took 7 years to reach an agreement of sorts and a public apology. The Earl Davis that Henry Ford is writing to was  a personal representative of his and a former assistant U.S. attorney general; Joseph Palma worked in the New York office of the Secret Service (according to Neil Baldwin in his book, Henry Ford and the Jews, Public Affairs, N.Y.) There were extending circumstances of course that helped bring this publication to an end least of which was an ongoing libel suit brought against Ford and his paper, and a great decrease in the sales of the Model A and the rise of GM; also the re-vamping if you will,  to set up for the new Ford Model T and the accompanying P.R. campaigns.

December, 1922

 

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Op-Ed: Take that, Henry Ford! Car company goes from anti-Semitic founder to new Jewish COO

By Jason Miller · December 4, 2012 

On his 75th birthday, July 30, 1938, Henry Ford became the first Amercian to receive the Verdienstkreuz Deutscher Adler -the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, created by Hitler as the highest honor given by Germany to a foreigner.